Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/494

 4C2 HISTORY OF GREECE. abundant flow. It supplies to the poet both materials to reoom- bine and adorn, and a basis as well as a stimulus for further in ventions of his own ; and this at a time when the poet is religioua teacher, historian, and philosopher, all in one, not, as he be- comes at a more advanced period, the mere purveyor of avowed, though interesting, fiction. Such popular stories, and such historical songs (meaning by historical, simply that which is accepted as history) are found in most quarters of the globe, and especially among the Teutonic and Celtic populations of early Europe. The old Gothic songs were cast into a continuous history by the historian Ablavius ;! and the poems of the Germans respecting Tuisto the earth-born god, his son Mannus, and his descendants the eponyms of the va- rious German tribes, 2 as they are briefly described by Tacitus, remind us of Hesiod, or Eumelus, or the Homeric Hymns. Jacob Grimm, in his learned and valuable Deutsche Mythologie, lias exhibited copious evidence of the great fundamental analogy, along with many special differences, between the German, Scan- dinavian, and Grecian mythical world ; and the Dissertation of Mr. Price (prefixed to his edition of Warton's History of En glish Poetry) sustains and illustrates Grimm's view. The same personifying imagination the same ever-present conception of the will, sympathies, and antipathies of the gods as the producing c.auses of phenomena, and as distinguished from a course of na- ture with its invariable sequence the same relations between gods, heroes, and men, with the like difficulty of discriminating the one from the other in many individual names a similar wholesale transfer of human attributes to the gods, with the ab- sence of human limits and liabilities a like belief in Nymphs, Giants, and other beings, neither gods nor men the same co- alescence of the religious with the patriotic feeling and faith these are positive features common to the early Greeks with the early Germans : and the negative conditions of the two 1 Jornandes, De Reb. Geticis, c.app. 4-6. z Tacit. Mor. German, c. 2. " Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum npud cos memorise et annalium genus est, Tuistonem Deum terri editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque. Quidam licentki vetustatia, plnres Deo ortos, pluresque gentis appellationes, Marsos, Gambrivios, Sa* TOB. Vandaliosque affirmant : eaquo vera et antiqua nomina."